Archive for February, 2011

Turn your monitor on its side for this one by translator Edwin Hawkes himself:

Right next to Jack Vance, in his local Waterstones over in the United Kingdom!

And here it is in Kinokuniya in Tokyo, in the foreign-language section. Note the yellow-covered Japanese title—it’s a magazine, actually, containing a list of ten must-read mysteries, many of which are also on the display. Also interesting is the call-outs for Orange Prize winning books. (The Orange Prize is awarded to women’s writing.)

These reviews are especially gratifying coming from a venue primarily interested in the romance genre. For a long time, a retrograde fear of what author Debra Doyle calls girl cooties has infected the world of science fiction, and hard SF—science fiction that uses and privileges real science—was the worst of all: “Hard sf” is their science fiction of choice, because it has the fewest girl cooties of any of the sf subgenres. No subjectivity, no mushy bits, none of that messy relationship stuff getting in the way of the classic sf values of hardness and rigor (and no, I don’t think the elevation of those particular values is coincidental.), Doyle writes.

Romance, of course, is wall-to-wall girl cooties. Perhaps not surprisingly, the feeling was often mutual—hard SF was seen as the precinct of uber-nerds and nobody interested in human relationships would want to ever want to read any. Sometimes this fear of girl cooties even enters into the world of real speculative science, as biologist Athena Andreadis points out with her essay (with a not-safe-for-work drawing) on 2009′s Singularity Summit. (The Singularity being a concept beloved of hard SF fans and, increasingly, policymakers and scientists.)

But in Japan, at least as far as SF literature is concerned, girl cooties and hard SF mix just fine. Why, one might say that the units of “girlishness” in books like The Next Continent and Rocket Girls aren’t an infection at all, but actually an organic part of the human condition. Science is for everyone, after all, as it increases our understanding of the universe in which we live, and as it can potentially be used to improve all our lives. Indeed, if we want science to improve our lives rather than destroy them, we’d all better have an interest in the field and its implications for policy, health, and the environment. That’s why hard SF needs to be written for a wide variety of readers, not just for the nerdcore hardcore of those men who are afraid of “girl cooties.” Publishing hard SF titles that can be reviewed and championed by Romantic Times is one reason why I love my job.

Darn, I was hoping to have this ready for you all yesterday for Valentine’s Day, but it didn’t happen. (Would you believe a long line at the flower shop?) But today, here’s a present for all you iPad, Phone, iBook people out there:

Behold, Useful Monsters: Mardock Scramble 104 a novelette* in the world of Mardock Scramble, for you, for free! It’s a prequel, very exciting, and also offers a glimpse into the dark future of libertarianism gone mad and vending machine property rights. Do check it out! Of course, Mardock Scramble itself is now also available in the iBookstore! Much lighter than the 800-page print version!

Just a quick note since we’re asked this all the time: Mardock Scramble will also be on Kindle, perhaps as early as this afternoon. Maybe tomorrow. (Would you believe a long line at the flower shop?) The second it goes live I’ll tweet it. And also, we would have loved to offer Useful Monsters for free to Kindle readers as well, but Kindle doesn’t currently allow for free distribution of new titles. We do, however, have a secondMardock Scramble novelette coming right to the World Wide Web in a few weeks! It’ll be a free-for-all that’s truly free for all! So keep an eye out!

*What’s a novelette? It’s a long short story, or a short novella. You know, in the 9-13,000 word range.